Daily Times

Scanning the society and fashion pages of Pakistani newspapers and magazines the past few weeks one was hard put to guess the country was under martial law. Pictures of fashion shows, snazzy get-togethers at upscale hotels, jewellery exhibits and of course the ubiquitous dinners honouring this or that foreign dignitary — coiffed hair, posed smiles, even smug indifference — were in sharp contrast to the national backsliding. What does one make of this?
For many in Pakistan, especially the supposedly “liberal” cadre, life seems to simply go on with nary an impact on them. Martial law may have been imposed, thousands of lawyers may have been imprisoned, the Constitution may have been suspended, but the social calendar of the glitterati remains full of the most pleasing distractions.
One way to rationalise this dogged pursuit of pleasure despite everything would be to disguise it as a form of reified survivalism, the spirit of the Pakistani liberal elite to continue in their pursuits regardless of the incursion of both military authoritarianism and Islamic extremism. Indeed, many of those whose smiling faces are plastered across these pages would have you believe just that. Yet, to do so is to cast a flimsy and deceptive curtain over the grim reality such obstinate apathy disguises. What lies beneath is neither a valorous spirit of survival nor an intellectually motivated form of resistance. It is a crude and repulsive apathy towards the disastrous course of events that have both eviscerated the rule of law and allowed the perpetuation of extremist agendas.
The apathy of the liberal elite is not a new phenomenon, though, one of the most recent and oft-remembered cases being that of the Iranian liberal elite under the regime of the Shah of Iran. As the roots of an incipient Islamic Revolution festered in Iran, the Iranian elite dressed in Dior and Hermes, their spirits sufficiently inured by the intoxicating magic of Dom Perignon denied the possibility of the destruction of their charmed world. As they do in the party circles of Lahore and Karachi, the cries of the mullahs seemed to the Iranians a distant reality, the calls for the imposition of Sharia a fantasy that could would never truly entrench itself in their beloved Persia.
The increasingly authoritarian Shah of Iran, in the meantime, continued to crack down both on secular opposition and religious leaders, his secret SAVAK police rounding up scores of people. Many were tortured and few avenues existed to appeal the unilateral fiat of an authoritarian ruler. But despite the increasing pressure, both of growing religious extremism that presented a direct threat to their lifestyle and increasingly authoritarianism that made the enjoyment of freedom not a legal right but a privilege granted at the whim of the Shah, the party in Iran continued, until its unceremonious end by the Revolution.
Despite the obvious parallels that emerge from such a recollection, the Iran of the seventies was different from the Pakistan of today in many ways. But the differences, like the similarities, bode only ill for Pakistan in demonstrating the dismal depth of our intellectual decline. Also, despite being beset by the similar quandary of being sandwiched between authoritarianism and religious extremism, the Iranian condition had an authenticity, an ideological depth whose absence makes the Pakistani situation a devolved and degenerate version of pre-revolutionary Iran.
Unlike Iran, Pakistan’s liberal elites are not governed by any ideological commitment to liberalism. At the very least the Shah of Iran, however misguided and draconian his rule, had a vision of capturing the Persian grandeur of old and reclaiming a pre-Islamic past, a repeatedly defined and articulated ideological position. In Pakistan, the authoritarian politics that have defined the last decade under the meaningless catchphrase of “enlightened moderation” are instead a visionless and ideologically empty conglomeration guided by a set of elites sometimes civilian and sometime military, preserving their self-interest rather than achieving a vision.
The Iranian “Left” that did not support the Shah stood guilty of having been co-opted by the smarmy rhetoric of the Islamists to overthrow an authoritarian leader. Their sin was one of political strategy. In Pakistan, the ideological absence of a real “Left” defined by the actual avowal of leftist socialist ideology is instead illustrative of a society defined by intellectual poverty rather than the intense intellectual embattlement of pre-revolutionary Iran.
Even a comparison of Iranian and Pakistani Islamism is a case in point.
Iran had Ali Shariati, a Sorbonne-educated politician and philosopher whose lectures combine the rhetorical genius of existential philosophy with a reconstructed “modern” Islamism, notably a distinctly Iranian construction however destructive its ultimate intent. Pakistan has a bunch of itinerant mullahs like Maulana Fazlullah or the Maulanas of the Red Mosque whose attempts at rousing the intellect constitute attacking video shops and banning music.
Even Pakistani Islamism, in its cruel and medieval parody of Saudi Wahhabism and Sunni militancy lacks the intellectual originality of the theological reconstructions propagated by Ali Shariati. While Shariati’s agenda, the establishment of a theological state realised later by Ayatollah Khomeini, was illiberal in every way, it was inherently distinct from the intellectually infantile crude literalism of the Taliban wreaking havoc in Swat and Waziristan.
The discussion of differences, and the evocation of similarities between Iran and Pakistan, a topic I have returned to repeatedly, is a dismal one. If the Iranian battle was one of divergent ideological currents, an authoritarian liberal Shah, a duped socialist Left and an increasingly powerful Islamist Right, the Pakistani one is between an apathetic, ideologically empty elite and an intellectually crude Islamist extremism.
And so, while the trumpets of change may sound again and again, the increasing indifference demonstrated by those in Pakistan that stand to lose the most in the event of an even further spread of Islamism remain shrouded in a dogged and obstinate refusal to respond to the crisis facing them.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

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